Steve Wozniak is the Bay Area's next tech innovator to be immortalized by Madame Tussauds for their San Francisco attraction at Fisherman's Wharf. The 64-year-old self-proclaimed geek and cofounder of Apple has won the people's choice vote and will now join Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in the wax figure lineup.
Congratulations to Steve Wozniak, who certainly responds with a drumroll to the Lennon/McCartney question, "Will you still love me when I'm sixty-four?"
Robust voting and international attention resulted from the open competition announced in April, which was whittled down to 10 finalists a month before yesterday's announcement of a winner. The nine other finalists nominated by the public for the coveted figure space were: Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Frank Oppenheimer of Exploratorium, Jane Metcalfe of Wired Magazine, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, George Lucas of Lucasfilm, Larry Page of Google, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo and Edwin Catmull of Pixar.
According to Madame Tussauds, the process will begin with Wozniak sitting for several hours while a team of master sculptors take more than 250 measurements. The sculpting process takes three to four months and it's expected that the new life-size, life-like Woz figure will be revealed in fall 2015.
“I am incredibly excited to be inducted into the Madame Tussauds family. I remember visiting the London Museum as a kid, and how cool it was to see Mark Knopfler’s figure in wax,” says Wozniak. “I can’t wait to see my figure next to Jobs – it’ll be just like old times.” The engineer and huge Apple fan is a native of San Jose who left Apple in 1987 to pursue other projects.
He and Steve Jobs used his parents' garage in the early days of Apple, testing products at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California and selling them for $666.66 at a Mountain View shop called Byte Shop Computer Store, according to Steve Wozniak in a 2014 video for Bloomberg Business.
Madame Tussauds is the worldwide waxworks named for the Swiss-born Marie Tussaud, an 18th century sculptress who launched the concept in London. In San Francisco, the world's 17th location opened in 2014 at 145 Jefferson Street in prime Fisherman’s Wharf. Welcoming visitors 365 days a year, Madame Tussauds is adjacent to The San Francisco Dungeon, where a summertime Jack the Ripper exhibition opens on June 6, 2015.